MILITARY TRACT PAPERS. 



NO. 2. 

/ 



PIONEERS 



OF 



CIVILIZATION IN ILLINOIS 



EVARTS B. GREENE 



ILLINOIS STATE REFORMATORY PRINT. 




EVARTS BOUTELL GREENE, Ph. D. 



MILITARY TRACT PAPERS. NO. 2. 



PIONEERS 

OF 

CIVILIZATION IN ILLINOIS 

I 

; AN ADDRESS BY 

EVARTS BOUTELL GREENE, PH. D. 

Dean of the College of Literature and Arts 
and Professor of History 

j IN THE 

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 



Before the Trustees, Faculty, and Students 

of the 

^Vestern Illinois State Normal School 



TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1907. 



<^'^\ 

V ^\^ 



IN «XCHAITG£. 

Ill.Univ, 

MAY 16 I9IQ 



PIONEERS OF 
CIVILIZATION IN ILLINOIS 



Eighty-nine years ago today, President Monroe signed 
the joint declaration of "the Senate and the House of Repre- 
sentatives of the United States in Congress assembled, that 
the State of Illinois shall be one and is hereby declared to 
be one of the United States of America, and admitted into 
the Union on an equal footing with the orginal states in all 
respects whatever." After years of tutelage, of training in 
partial self-government, the commonwealth of Illinois had at 
last attained its political majority and stood full armed 
among the sisterhood of states. 

On this anniversary day, it would be natural and appro- 
priate to think of the year 1818 as the conclusion of a long 
and typically American evolution. The broad outlines of 
the story have been often drawn. The first chapter of 
French occupation begins with the voyage of Joliet and Mar- 
quette inl673, and closes in 1765 when the British flag first rose 
above the walls of Fort Chartre's. ••■' Then comes the British 
dominion ending with the dramatic.story of Clark's conquest 
in 1778. Finally, in the th'ird chapter, we have the coming 
of the Anglo-American pioneers, the gradual displacement 
of the Indians, and the development from military to rep- 
resentative government till, in 1818, the frontier common- 
wealth was ready for full membership in the Union. 

Today, however, let us think of that memorable third of 
December as a beginning, rather than an ending. Let us 
turn from the backwoodsmen, whose work was nearly 
done, to the new pioneers whose work was just 
beginning, — the pioneers of a finer and more ideal 
civilization. Of the many who deserve such recognition we 
may select three typical figures, each representing a dis- 
tinct element in our early population: Morris Birkbeck, an 
English emigrant farmer and founder of the English colony 
in Edwards county; Edward Coles, a Virginia gentlemen of 
the old school; John M. Peck, a Yankee Baptist preacher, a 
missionary noo of religion only, but of education and social 



6 

justice. All these men came to Illinois in the years be- 
tween 1817 and. 1821, bringing to their new home matured 
convictions on public questions, an intense public spirit and 
devoted loyalty to high ideals. 

Let us try now to picture to ourselves in outline the life 
of this young commonwealth as these men found it. First 
of all, they were coming to the extreme outpost of civiliza- 
in the Northwest. Iowa on the west and Wisconsin on the 
north were scarcely touched by white settlers, and nearly 
thirty years went by before either was ripe for statehood. 
Steamboats were only beginning to ply on western rivers, 
and even as late as 1837 it required from twelve to fifteen 
days to go from New York to St. Louis by way of Philadel- 
phia, Pittsburg, and the Ohio river. So far as real intellec- 
tual intercourse was concerned, Illinois was much farther 
from New York than San Francisco is to day from London. 

In this frontier state there were living in 1820 some 54,- 
000 whites and about 1500 negroes, chiefly indented servants 
or slaves, a total somewhat less than the population of Peoria 
in 1900. Nearly all of them lived in the southern third of 
the present State: in 1818 the three northern counties were 
Madison, Bond, and Crawford, each of which extended 
northward to the state line. Crawford county, covering the 
whole northeastern section of the State and including more 
than thirty of our present counties, had, in 1818 less than 
1000 white inhabitants. Even in southern Illinois the 
course of settlement clung pretty closely to the Mississippi 
on the one side and the Ohio and Wabash on the other, leav- 
ing sparsely settled interior counties where one might 
travel for days through almost unbroken wilderness. 

Of these 55,000 people nearly all were comparatively re- 
cent comers from the older states of the American Union. 
Probably less than one-fourth of those who were counted in 
1820 had lived in the State more than five years. The French 
population, extending from Randolph north to Madison coun- 
ty, had been completely overshadowed by the recent immigra- 
tion, though they gave a distinct and attractive social color to 
these Mississippi counties, especially to Kaskaskia, the first 



State capital. Illiterate, unprogressive as they were, they could 
give lessons in the social graces to most of their American 
neighbors. Governor Ford notes it as a "remarkable fact that 
the roughest hunter and boatman among them could at any- 
time appear in a ball-room or other polite and gay assembly 
with the carriage and behavior of a well-bred gentleman." 
Of the few Frenchmen who gained political recognition from 
their fellow citizens the most prominent was Pierre Menard, 
the first lieutenant governor of the State, not a descendant of 
the old French stock, but a later emigrant from Canada. 

The distinctly American population had come mainly 
from the border states of the south and southwest. This 
familiar fact is, however, often misunderstood. The South ^^^Li^^v-/-^ 
from which most of these early settlers came was not the \ 

historic South of the tidewater region. Generally speaking, QjlMJjl^'^ 
they were neither slave-holding aristocrats nor "poor white 
trash", though both these classes were represented in Illi- 
nois. This vanguard of western colonization consisted, in 
the main, of that middle group of small farmers which is so 
often forgotten, but which, after all, formed a large part of 
the southern armies from 1861 to 1865, and which today, un- 
der such leaders as Senator Tillman, has won its fight for 
political recognition. Many of them had felt keenly the de- 
pressing influence of slavery at home and were glad to leave 
it behind them. Many of them, in 1824, combined with their 
northern neighbors to prevent the legalization of slavery in 
Illinois, not for love of the negro, but in defense of free 
white labor. It was only by a genuine psychological revo- 
.lution after four years of civil war, that they were brought 
to recognize the negro as a citizen. For the present Illinois 
was in thp fullest sense, by law as well as custom, a white 
man's state. 

Pioneers themselves, they came generally of pioneer 
stock. For many of them the coming to Illinois was not the 
leaving of one permanent home for another, but rather one 
more stage in a restless westward movement. As Birkbeck 
wrote in 1817, "Old America seems to be breaking up and 
moving westward". One generation had perhaps crossed 



8 

the Atlantic with the great stream of Scotch-Irish immigra- 
tion. Prom Philadelphia they had pushed on to the slopes 
of the mountains. A little later they, or their children, had 
moved northward into the "Great Valley of Virginia", or the 
back country of the Carolinas. In the revolutionary time 
and later they helped to make the pioneer commonwealths 
of Kentucky and Tennessee. The case of John Reynolds 
may be taken as typical. His parents came from Ireland to 
Pennsylvania where he was born; but he grew up in Tennes- 
see, and came in early manhood to Illinois where he rose to 
prominence, first as governor and later as representative in 
Congress. Woods, an English traveler, who visited Illinois 
in 1820, gives from his acquaintance some amusing instances 
of such pioneer families: "A man who boarded a short time 
at my house said he was born in Old Virginia; that he re- 
moved, with his father, over the mountains into New Virgin- 
ia, but left his father before he was twenty; that he married, 
and took up his abode in the wild parts of South Carolina, 
and built a cabin, the first in that part of Carolina. People 
settling around him, he sold his land, and removed into Ken- 
tucky ; and on the land he disposed of in Carolina, a town 
soon sprang up of 300 houses and seven large stores. In 
Kentucky he staid some years; but settlers arriving and 
seating themselves near him, he again moved off into the 
wild part of Indiana, near Rockport, where he now resides; 
but expressed a wish to come into Illinois as, he said, the 
country around him was not healthy for cattle. 

"A person who lives in Birks' Prairie, who has been 
there four years, and who has planted a small orchard, had 
a few apples last year, the first he ever grew, although he 
had planted six orchards before the present one . His wife 
says she has had twelve children but never had two born in 
one house; and does not remember how many houses they 
have inhabited since they were married; yet they think they 
are now fixed for life; but several of their sons are gone to 
the Red River, 700 miles to the southwest." 

The inevitable isolation of frontier life, continued from 
generation to generation, undoubtedly developed some ad- 



9 

mirable qualities: Physical courage, self-reliance, a virile 
democratic spirit,— these are repeatedly noted by foreign 
travelers. Nevertheless this constant movement from place 
to place interfered seriously with the normal process of edu- 
cation by which each new generation inherits and makes its 
own the achievements of those that have gone before. It 
was not only formal education that was lacking. The civil- 
izing influence of commerce was hardly felt at all in these 
frontier villages. There was a small trade with St. Louis 
and New Orleans, and there were a few important commer- 
cial families like the Morrisons at Kaskaskia. In the main, 
however, the family unit was economically independent. 
The family clothing was almost wholly homespun, and the 
market for surplus products was very small. Patterson, 
writing of early days in southern Illinois, tells of many of 
his neighbors living a whole year without the possession or 
use of fifty dollars in cash. 

In the pioneer period of the Atlantic seaboard, the 
church had been a powerful social and intellectual force. 
The Puritan meeting house was the social and intellectual, 
as well as the religious center of the New England town; in 
the South too, the clergymen, who were to a considerable 
extent the teachers also, were often men of university train- 
ing. The earliest religious guides of the western frontier 
were generally men of a different type, standing often on an 
intellectual level little above that of their hearers. We 
ought not to depreciate the great work done by the travel- 
ing preachers; for they attracted audiences which could 
hardly have been touched by the quieter and more intellec- 
tual kinds of religious teaching. Nevertheless the com- 
ing and going of such men can hardly be compared with the 
steady civilizing influence of organized churches and an edu- 
cated ministry. It is against such a background as this that 
we must set our pioneers of civilization, if we are to under- 
stand the obstacles they had to overcome and the real mean- 
ing of their work. 

Morris Birkbeck's career in Illinois began in the summer 
of 1817 when he, with his friend George Flower, selected 



10 

the site of their future English settlement in Edwards 
county: and the colony was definitely established during the 
spring and summer of 1818 while the people of Illinois were 
forming their first state constitution. 

Birkbeck was the son of an English Quaker preacher, 
and when he came to Illinois was over fifty years old and a 
widower with a considerable family. He had his early strug- 
gle with poverty, but gradually rose to the position of a 
prosperous leasehold farmer at Wanborough, a village in the 
county of Surrey. He had a strong taste for scientific 
studies and made for himself an enviable reputation as an 
agricultural expert. His interests were, however, by no 
means confined to agriculture. He had had solid training 
in Latin, knew some Greek, and in later life acquired a good 
reading knowledge of French. His writings show also ser- 
ious and independent thinking on religious and political 
subjects. As he grew older, he gradually drifted away from 
the Society of Friends in which he was brought up, but 
though his enemies denounced him as an infidel, the charge 
was certainly unjust. Birkbeck's political views were also 
radical. He left England fifteen years before the passage of 
the Reform Bill of 1832, at a time when political power was 
almost wholly in the hands of the landed aristocracy, but he 
was himself a strong believer in democratic institutions. 

At the close of the Napoleonic wars Birkbeck spent sev- 
eral months travelling through France, and showed his usu- 
al independence by avoiding the conventional routes of the 
tourist and making careful studies of rural life. On his re- 
turn he printed his Notes on a Tour in France, which passed 
through five editions in about three years, and found its way 
into the private library of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. 

Perhaps the most distinct portrait of Birkbeck that has 
come down to us is that drawn by his associate, George 
Flower, in his "History of the English Settlement in Ed- 
wards County." 

"When I first became acquainted with Birkbeck he 
was nearly fifty years of age, enjoying excellent health. 
Mental and bodily activity were combined with unimpaired 



11 

habits. In person he was below middle stature — rather 
small, spare, not fleshy, but muscular and wiry. With a 
constitution not of the strongest, he was yet a strong and 
active man. His bodily frame was strengthened and seasoned 
by early labor and horseback exercise in the open air, which, 
from the nature of his business, was necessary to its super- 
vision. He was capable of undergoing great fatigue and of 
enduring fatigue without injury. His complexion was bronzed 
from exposure; face marked with many lines; rather sharp 
features, lighted by a quick twinkling eye; and rapid utter- 
ance. He was originally of an irascible temper, which was 
subdued by his Quaker breeding, and kept under control by 
watchfulness and care. But eye, voice, and action would 
occasionally betray the spirit-work within. Mr. Birkbeck 
when I first became acquainted with him was a widower. 
When no friend was with him he would sometimes sit for 
hours in the afternoon, by his fire in the dining room, his 
only companions a long stemmed pipe and a glass of water 
on the table beside him. 

"The little artificial thirst, occasioned by smoking, 
when habitually allayed by mixed liquors, or anything strong- 
er than water, he thought had betrayed into habits of intem- 
perance, unsuspectingly, more individuals than any other 
single cause. A leisurely walk around the premises, an ob- 
servation on anything out of place, with directions for the 
coming labor of tomorrow, generally closed the day's busi- 
ness with him. At tea he again joined the family circle, 
enjoyed the exhilerating refreshment, and the abandonment 
of all business cares. 

"If Mr. Birkbeck was absent from the family party in the 
drawing room, — and sometimes he was so, — even when his 
house was full of visitors, he was sure to be found in a small 
study, a little room peculiarly his own trying some chemical 
experiment, or analyzing some earth or new fossil that he 
picked up in his morning ramble in his chalk quarries." 

This pleasant scene of English country life was disturbed 
by the agricultural depression prevailing in England after 
the long continental wars. The lease of Birkbeck's farm was 



12 

about to expire and he felt some anxiety as to his own future 
and that of his family. At the same time two incidents oc- 
curred which turned his attention strongly toward America. 
One was the visit of Edward Coles, the future governor, 
who had already become interested in Illinois; and the other 
was the American journey of his friend Richard Flower, dur- 
ing the year 1816. The reasons for Birkbeck's final de- 
cision to leave England are best told in his own words and 
he doubtless spoke for many others of his class: 

"Before I enter on these new cares and toils I must take 
a parting glance at those I have left behind; and they are 
of a nature unhappily too familiar to a large portion of my 
countrymen to require description. 

"How many are there who, having capitals in business 
which would be equal to their support at simple interest, 
are submitting to privations under the name of economy 
which are near akin to the sufferings of poverty; and deny- 
ing themselves the very comforts of life to escape taxation; 
and yet their difficulties increase, their capitals moulder away, 
and the resources fail on which they had relied for the fu- 
ture establishment of their families. 

"A nation with half its population supported by alms, 
or poor-rates, and one-fourth of its income derived from tax- 
es, many of which are dried up in their sources, or speedily 
becoming so, must teem with emigrants from one end to the 
other; and for such as myself, who have had 'nothing to do 
with the laws but to obey them', it is quite reasonable and just 
to secure a timely retreat from the approaching crisis, either 
of anarchy or despotism. 

"An English farmer, to which class I had the honor to be- 
long, is in possession of the same rights and privileges with 
the villeins of old time, and exhibits for the most part, a suit- 
able political character. He has no voice in the appointment of 
the legislature unless he happen to possess a freehold of forty 
shillings a year, and he is then expected to vote in the inter- 
est of his landlord. He has no concern with public affairs 
excepting as a tax payer, a parish officer, or a militia man. 
He has no right to appear at a county meeting, unless the 



13 

word inhabitant should find its way into the sheriff's invita- 
tion; in this case he may show his face among the nobiUty, 
clergy, and freeholders, — a felicity which once occurred to 
myself, when the inhabitants of Surrey were invited to assist 
the gentry in crying down the Income Tax. 

"Thus having no elective franchise, an English farmer 
can scarcely be said to have a political existence, and polit- 
ical duties he has none, except such as under existing cir- 
cumstances would inevitably consign him to the special 
guardianship of the Secretary of State for the home depart- 
ment. 

"In exchanging the condition of an English farmer for 
that of an American proprietor, I expect to suffer many in- 
conveniences; but I am willing to make a great sacrifice of 
present ease, were it merely for the sake of obtaining in the 
decline of life, an exemption from that wearisome solicitude 
about pecuniary affairs, from which, even the affluent find 
no refuge in England; and for my children a career of enter- 
prise and wholesome family connections in a society whose 
institutions are favorable to virtue; and at last the consola- 
tion of leaving them efficient members of a flourishing public 
spirited, energetic community, where the insolence of wealth 
and the servility of pauperism, between which in England 
there is scarcely an interval remaining, are alike unknown." 

In selecting his future home Birkbeck was influenced 
first by climatic reasons which led him to prefer the region 
west of the Alleghenies and south of the Great Lakes. On 
the other hand, he excluded the south and the southwest 
because they were tainted with slavery. "If political liberty 
be so precious that to obtain it I can forego the well-earned 
comforts of an English home, it must not be to degrade my- 
self and corrupt my children by the practice of slave-keep- 
ing". 

In the spring of 1S17 he took ship with several of his 
family for Richmond, Virginia, where he was joined by his 
friend Richard Flower. A few days latei- the whole com- 
pany began their long westward journey. The journey from 
Richmond to Pittsburg was made partly by stage coach. 



14 

partly by steamboat on the Potomac, aud for a considerable 
part of the distance on foot. Arrived at Pittsburg, Birk- 
beck wrote: "We have now fairly turned our backs on the 
old world and find ourselves in the very stream of emigra- 
tion. Old America seems to be breaking up and moving 
westward". 

At Pittsburg they had their choice of land and water 
routes to the Illinois country, but finally decided in favor 
of the horseback journey with its better opportunity for see- 
ing the country. Leaving Pittsburg early in June and pro- 
ceeding by leisurely stages through Chillicothe, Cincinnati, 
and Vincennes, they reached Shawneetown on the second of 
August. To Birkbeck, Shawneetown seemed "a phenome- 
non evincing the pertinaceous adhesion of the human animal 
to the spot where it has once fixed itself. As the lava of 
Mt. ^tna cannot dislodge this strange being from the 
cities which have been ravished by its eruptions, so the 
Ohio with its annual overflowings is unable to wash away 
the inhabitants of Shawneetown." 

On this long journey Birkbeck found much to criticise, 
but much also to admire. The lack of regard for cleanli- 
ness, a sort of "slouchiness" as a modern critic has put it, 
seemed to him a national vice; but in more than one in- 
stance he speaks of the American frontiersman as improv- 
ing on longer acquaintance. He believed that though in 
the same social class with the English peasantry, they 
showed clear superiority in their "manners and morals and 
especially in their proud independence of mind." 

This is not the place for describing at length the for- 
tunes of the English colony in their new home in Edwards 
county. We are most interested in the whole-hearted spirit 
in which its leaders gave themselves to the service of their 
adopted state. For several years, Birkbeck devoted much 
of his energy to the work of attracting settlers to Illinois. 
He wrote frequent letters to his friends in England, many 
of which were printed. His enthusiasm drew upon him the 
attacks of William Cobbett, a well known English journal- 
ist, who had spent a year in the United States, and there 



15 

were other critics who agreed with Cobbett that Birkbeclic's 
description was too highly colored and calculated to de- 
ceive the unsuspecting English emigrant. To these attacks 
Birkbeck and Flower replied in a series of vigorous pamph- 
lets now much sought after by students of western history. 

Birkbeck died only nine years after coming to Illinois, 
but in that brief period he left his impress clearly upon the 
life of the State. It is interesting, in these days of scientific 
agriculture, to remember that Birkbeck was one of the pio- 
neers in this field, becoming the first president of the Illinois 
Agricultural Society. 

The crowning event, however, of his whole career was 
his vigorous championship of the cause of free labor in the 
slavery contest of 1822-24, Over the signature of Jonathan 
Freeman he contributed to the Illinois Gazette a series of 
vigorous letters pointing out the injury which slavery would 
inflict, not only upon the negro, but upon the white man as 
well. In the midst of the contest to determine whether a 
convention should be held to amend the Constitution in the 
interest of slavery, he published his eloquent "Appeal to 
the People of Illinois" which has been reprinted by the Illi- 
nois State Historical Society in its Transactions for 1905. 
After the contest had ended in the defeat of the convention 
party, Birkbeck's services were recognized by his appoint- 
ment as secretary of state, though the proslavery interests 
were still strong enough to prevent his confirmation. 

In this momentous conflict between freedom and slavery, 
Birkbeck was brought into close relations with another lead- 
er in the same cause, the most attractive figure among all 
our early governors. Edward Coles, second governor of Illi- 
nois, was born in Albemarle county, Virginia, the county 
from which Thomas Jefferson went to his memorable service 
in the Continental Congress and to which he retired in the 
last years of his life. The early life of Edward Coles con- 
nected him closely with the historic families of old Virginia. 
Like his distinguished neighbor, he became a student of 
William and Mary College; but a broader experience came 
in 1809 when Madison, just beginning a troubled term as 



16 

president, appointed young Coles as his private secretary. 
Evidently the secretary's work was well done, for in 1816 he 
was sent by Madison on a special mission to St. Petersburg. 

For many years, however, Coles had been troubled by a 
serious ethical problem. Like Jefferson and the other great 
Virginians, he was a slaveholder and, like many of them, he 
found it hard to reconcile slavery with the revolutionary 
doctrine of the "rights of man." In 1814 he began a corres- 
pondence with Jefferson urging him to take up the cause of 
gradual emancipation in Virginia. Jefferson expressed his 
sympathy, but could do little more. With Coles, however, 
the ideal maxims of the Jeffersonian creed were things to be 
taken in deadly earnest. Unable to screen himself from "the 
peltings and upbraidings of my conscience, and the just cen- 
sure, as I conceived, of earth and heaven", he "determined 
that I would not and could not hold my fellow man as a 
slave". He was equally resolved not to live in a slave-hold- 
ing community. 

After two preliminary visits, he completed his plans for 
removal to Illinois, and in 1819 embarked on the Ohio river 
with his negroes, to each of whom he gave, during the voy- 
age, a certificate of emancipation. Coles came to Illinois as 
register of the federal land office at Edwardsville, and soon 
became a leading figure in politics. Three years after his 
coming he became a candidate for the governorship and 
through the failure of the proslavery forces to act together, 
was finally elected. At the same election, however, a proslav - 
ery legislature was chosen which passed the well known reso- 
lution for a constitutional convention in the interest of slavery. 
In this struggle for liberty Coles showed himself throughout 
an aggressive and skilful leader. He spent his own money 
freely for the cause and was also able to secure funds from 
influential friends outside the State. He showed too that he 
was willing to sacrifice personal popularity. His house was 
attacked by a mob and, after his term of oflice closed, he was 
subjected to petty legal persecution on account of irregulari- 
ties in his method of emancipating his own slaves. 

"With all the credit due to Coles and Birkbeck, it is doubtful 



17 

whether the fight could have been won without the equally 
efficient work of another ally, the Baptist preacher, John 
Mason Peck. In some respects a less dramatic figure than 
either Birkbeck or Coles, his total contribution to the life of 
the State was probably greater than that of either. In Birk- 
beck and Coles the mother country and the "Old Dominion" 
made their finest contributions to the life of the new state. 
Peck, on the other hand, stands in a broad way for New 
England ideals in politics, education, and religion. A Con- 
necticut Yankee by birth, he was ordained in 1813 as a Bap- 
tist minister in New York. Pour years later he came to St. 
Louis and in 1821 he established himself at Rock Spring, St. 
Clair County, Illinois. For the next thirty years he was be- 
yond question one of the strongest forces for intelligence 
and righteousness in the whole Mississippi Valley. 

His primary mission in Illinois was religious. As a 
Baptist minister he was the founder and adviser of churches 
in Illinois and Missouri. He was also the agent of the Bible 
Society and one of the most zealous promoters of Sunday 
Schools. For all these things he deserves to be gratefully 
remembered, not only by his fellow Baptists, but by Christ- 
ians of every name. 

Throughout his career, however. Peck showed himself 
to be a man of the broadest interests. In the educational field 
also he was a pioneer. Out of the seminary which he 
founded at Rock Spring grew Shurtleff College one of the 
first three colleges chartered by the legislature of Illinois. 

The student of western history has also reasons of his 
own for holding Peck in grateful remembrance. Prom 1831 
to 1848 he published a series of "Gazeteers"and "Emigrant's 
Guides" which are among our most useful and trustworthy 
sources of information. Writing with genuine enthusiasm 
for the resources of his adopted state, he also took the 
greatest pains to give his readers an accurate view of things 
as they were, and his scholarly qualities soon gained him a 
wider reputation. In 1850 he prepared the revised edition 
of Perkins' Annals of the West, and Jared Sparks selected 
him to write the life of Daniel Boone in liis American Bio- 
graphy. 



18 

Peck's part in the anti- slavery struggle of 1822-24 was 
recognized as of the greatest importance by friends and 
enemies alike. As agent of the Bible Society he had un- 
usual opportunities for meeting people in various parts of 
the State. He was also active in the organization of anti- 
slavery societies. John Reynolds, who was one of the lead- 
ers of the proslavery party, was much impressed by Peck's 
capacity for organization and said of him many years after 
that he "performed his part with the tact and talent of an 
experienced general." Reynolds is not always a safe guide 
for the student of Illinois history, but his testimony on this 
point is supported by other evidence and we may well agree 
with his final estimate of Peck's work in Illinois that "he has 
as much, and perhaps more, than any other man in the State 
made that lasting and solid impression of morality, religion, 
and order in the people of the State that Illinois so emi- 
nently enjoys today.'" 

Peck was far more fortunate than either Birkbeck or 
Coles in the recognition which came to him in his own life- 
time. Birkbeck died in 1825, the object of bitter hostility on 
the part of the proslavery leaders who had their revenge 
in defeating his confirmation for the office of secretary of 
state, to which he had been appointed by his friend. Gover- 
nor Coles. Coles also had sacrificed his political future by 
his course in the governorship and a few years later he left 
Illinois, after some contemptible persecution at the hands of 
his political enemies. Peck, on the other hand, outlived the 
partisan animosities of that critical period and in his last 
years won the cordial recognition even of his former op- 
ponents. 

Throughout his mature life Peck was distinctively a 
western man, but it is pleasant in the midst of much section- 
al jealousy to remember that he received finally the recog- 
nition of our oldest American university. The Harvard 
commencement of 1852 was a memorable occasion. The 
president of the college was Jared Sparks, one of our fore- 
most American historians, to whose American Biography 
Peck had contributed the volume on Daniel Boone. One of 



19 

those who received the degree of Doctor of Laws at this time 
was Francis Way land, president of Brown University and 
one of the ablest college presidents of the day, a worthy 
contemporary of Mark Hopkins of Williams College. Then 
came two of the greatest names in the history of the Ameri- 
can Bar, Caleb Gushing, soon to become attorney general of 
the United States, and Benjamin R. Curtis who live years 
later, as Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 
gave the great dissenting opinion against Chief Justice Taney 
in the Dred Scott case. There were also two distinguish- 
ed Europeans, Alexis de Toqueville, author of Democracy in 
America, and Guizot the historian, who had also been one of 
the most influential French statesmen of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The five who received the degree of S. T. D. were all 
men of real distinction; and one of them, side by side with 
Andrew P. Peabody and Horace Bushnell, was our own pio- 
neer preacher, John Mason Peck. 

These three men, Birkbeck, Coles, and Peck, came to 
Illinois at a time when, with all its natural resources, it was 
poor in many of the essentials of civilization, and when 
many of its leaders were ready to make the fatal mistake 
of discouraging free labor by legalizing slavery. Between 
1820 and 1830 these men, and others like them, laid the 
foundations for what is best in our social order. Educated 
men themselves, they set new standards for civic leadership. 
Their sensitive jealousy for human rights, their high sense 
of spiritual and ethical values, and their constant appeal to 
the intelligence, rather than the prejudices of the average 
man won the day for freedom in 1824, and laid the foun- 
dations for sounder and more intelligent citizenship. 

In these days, when the captains of industry are looming 
large on our social horizon, and the temptations of material 
success are making it difficult to find young men for some of 
the highest forms of social service, can we not do something 
to restore a sounder balance by remembering more often 
than we do these men wiio sacrificed personal profit and pop- 
ularity in answer to the call of social service y 



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